This is a podcast for the curious. Strap yourself in for genuine dialogues with people who think deeply and are ready to tackle the big questions, such as broadcaster Terry O'Reilly, fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay, and journalist Sally Armstrong.

Now, there are some big forces at play in our world. Certainly,
one of the biggest is our changing environment – which might be
better described as, our changing habitat. Not just global warming,
but environmental degradation, overstretched and underprotected
natural resources, the shifting geopolitics and, frankly,
geography, of energy extraction. We may discover in the hindsight
of a century from now that all of our seemingly isolated smaller
problems, whether we’re talking terrorism, suicide rates, economic
or ethnic nationalism, distrust in politicians and the media, even
a distorted sense of self – all of these may in fact be connected
to our radically shifting habitat.

When we look back at ancient civilizations in today’s Mexico,
Peru, Iraq, China and India, we can clearly see the root causes
that led to civilizational collapse. Jared Diamond’s work in
Guns, Germs and Steel
as well as Collapse makes it clear that,
when past societies imploded, there was almost always environmental
factors right at the centre. Cut down too many trees, strain the
rivers and lakes, over-cultivate the soil – our environment can’t
put up with us forever, and eventually we outrun ourselves.

For for the first time in our history we have the ability to
look back and assess, without superstition, the shipwrecks of our
past, and modify our behaviour accordingly. But in our politics we
don’t seem to be able to act long-term and tackle these existential
threats directly, boldly and definitively. In typical democracies,
elections occur every few years, which forces politicians to act in
the short-term interest even if they can see the long. Voters,
likewise, favour concrete, tangible action. Cut taxes. Increase
services. Reduce crime. Build hospitals. Who wants to vote for a
plan that will lead to all of these things, but 20 years down the
line? Shouldn’t it be simpler than that?

More troublingly, people have lost trust and faith in the
system. Maybe it’s because most people never had to fight for it,
in war or through a depression. Perhaps also, liberal democracies
have become overly managerial and technocratic – in other words,
all the big structural and moral decisions have already been made,
so by the time you sit in the ballot box, your options feel rather
dull. It is apple versus apple versus apple, with various shadings
of red – distinctions without difference. Politicians find
themselves trying to make a feast out of a morsel, fighting over
marginal tax rates and pension alterations and health care budgets.
These issues are important, absolutely, as anyone who works in
government or policy or that particular special interest will tell
you. But for someone who doesn’t want to spend their time knee-deep
in policy muck? They’re just plain boring. Is it any wonder that
when an orange is thrown in with the apples, people get excited?
Even if they know the orange is off-colour and rancid and full of
mould – maybe they’d rather pick the orange rather than see another
apple ever again?

This is a poor summation of what is happening with our
democracy. Many thinkers call it the crisis of liberalism. They
have written all kinds of articles and books in earnest since
Brexit and Trump demonstrated in 2016 that liberal democracy is not
an inevitable end point of history, or in some terminal, abstract
decline, but rather that it is ripe for a fall. It’s ironic,
because those who now rush to defend the rules-based world order of
individual rights, free-market capitalism with a pinch of
government, untampered elections, a healthy press and the belief in
human progress often call themselves liberals or progressives, but
by definition they are conservative. They want to conserve what we
already have.

Whatever label we use, not all defenders want to go back to the
way things were before an amoral PR mogul became the US president.
Many propose some radical changes to the way we govern our
societies, not only in response to the threat of a tyrant or a
demagogue or just an ignoramus taking over – but in response to the
long-term civilizational issues, like climate change, that we all
know we must face. Some of these ideas seem evil (for example, put
multinational corporations in charge to maximize profit), some are
old-fashioned (say, abolish the concept of property), some are
capricious (take away the vote from those people who can’t prove
they know what they’re talking about – or give those who can, more
votes), some are proven recipes for disaster (let the army run
things), and some are so crazy that they just might work (abolish
parliaments and turn a constitution into an algorithm).

Not all ideas are nuts or immoral or pie-in-the-sky, though all
of them sound radical at first. Here are a few, from a recent book
called Radical Markets: Uprooting
Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner
and E. Glen Weyl. At core, Posner and Weyl want the very idea of
markets to go beyond making money, to serve society as a whole.
They propose a wealth tax, in which everyone must place a value on
every single thing they own. Your car, your blender, your dog’s
ashes – everything. You will be taxed on your overall wealth,
whatever it is you declare. The catch: you must be ready to sell
anything at the value you gave to it. Want to lower your taxes by
saying your Porsche is worth only $500? You must be prepared to
sell your Porsche to the first person willing to pay $500.

The idea here is that all property is put to its best use, while
raising revenue efficiently. And that’s not all. Another idea in
the book is to rethink how we vote. Get rid of one person, one
vote. Instead, everyone gets an equal amount of credits, which in
turn can buy votes on particular issues. Say you get 100 credits.
Do you feel really passionate about stopping people from spreading
dog ashes in parks? You can spend all your credits on that. Or you
can spread it around. The more you spend on one thing, the more it
costs you to spend more on that one thing. In other words, your
first vote would cost one credit, but your second on that same
thing would be four, and your third nine. This, in theory, would
allow minorities to fight back against majorities that are
impinging on their rights – people who care more on one issue will
vote more on that one issue. In practice, you get more votes for
caring about more things.

Of course, these ideas are outlandish and would lead to
unintended consequences. But the authors aren’t proposing them
because they think they are the only way, or even the right way.
They want to jumpstart the conversation about how we govern
ourselves and structure our society. They want to bring back the
big questions. If we agree that this is not working, then it might
be better if we think through our next steps rather than just let
things happen. Better to come up with ideas about our predicament
than just shrug about the unfairness and go onto our next
distraction. For, who knows what will join the basket of apples and
oranges next time around if we simply leave our political evolution
to its own devices.

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About the Podcast

Your weekly podcast for a world in flux.
Globalization and climate change. The rise of social media and the decline and fall of Blockbuster Video. AI and VR. Donald Trump and Flat Earthers. The world is changing so fast that we can't get a grip on how we got here, let alone where we're headed.
Join Ben Charland as he peels back the headlines to ask, what are the events, characters, forces and ideas that shape the human story today? Have things always been this nuts, or are they getting crazier by the day? Who were those barbarians that took down the Blockbuster Empire? Just what on Earth is going on?